


ghosts of the past, or, how to be a haunted house

by xhorhas



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Gen, ToT: Monster Mash, ToT: Trick - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-24
Updated: 2016-10-24
Packaged: 2018-08-24 08:57:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 854
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8366173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xhorhas/pseuds/xhorhas
Summary: Belarus has taken it upon herself to help a village butcher out with his hometown's little spirit problem. But when it comes down to it, she wonders, is it actually a problem?





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [VampirePaladin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/VampirePaladin/gifts).



The ghost, as if there haven't been problems enough just in my getting to this point, tells me it doesn't want to leave.

All the ingredients I had gathered as part of an attempt to coax it into moving on—rosemary, juniper, a couple cigarettes—lie impotently, as well as a bit wet, on the forest floor. It's caked with thick snow, the sharp chill of which bites into my legs. I am kneeling on the ground, supplicant and freezing, in a village in the west so visually unremarkable as to feel like an illustrator's example of the generic type. To be fair it's nighttime. Find me someone who in the pitch dark can accurately tell a rural Belarusian town from one in Poland, in Lithuania, and I'll show you—

Well.

Me. Or Poland. Or even, yes, Lithuania. There's an intangible quickening of the blood. A prickling along the skin. Try hopping back-and-forth over a line that exists only in cartographical imagination and see how strange it nonetheless feels to alternate between _belonging_ and _not belonging_ as fast as flicking a lightswitch—

—the wind picks up around me in a bitter gust and I think I see a silver silhouette glimmering amongst the swaying and creaking boughs—this thought of borders is a tangent; I'm getting distracted.

If it's hard to focus: it's dark and it's cold. Neither the darkest nor the coldest I have experienced, but all the same, dark, cold, and futile, given that the ghost has made its ectoplasmic mind up about remaining spiritually sewn to its hearth and home. Which means I am going to let down Pavel and Andrej Barysevich, from the butcher's, who are the only ones to have defended the idea of my going into the woods to escort the ghost off and onwards, and even that only because they worry it might be their grandmother.

Again the howling of the wind. Along with it, of course, is the indefinable sense that the ghost howls also, that the afterlife is putting forth its absolute best effort to either frighten me or at the very least bother me enough that I go away already. I draw my cloak more tightly around my shoulders and frown into the unfriendly night.

It isn't that the rest of the villagers are opposed to the idea of not being haunted. They just don't think I can manage it, and they've been quite vocal about their reasoning on that point. Oh, it's been here for so, so long: yes, I agree; that's a fair point. No one else has yet succeeded: fair, too. And who are you, coming here from, what, Minsk?, who are you to get involved, what do you know about _our_ ghosts: on this they're wrong, but I don't exactly have the liberty to disclose my true identity just to win arguments. Can you imagine? No, I'm not from Minsk, actually as it turns out I'm—

I stand. As I brush my coat free of its dusting of snow the blustery weather dies down, unnaturally quickly. Silence closes down like a vacuum and I can hear my own heart beating. There is a glimmer along the front of a tree. It makes no noise at all.

In this strange, pregnant sort of calm, I lie to myself that it's an early streak of sap. So lying to myself, I turn and begin to walk back towards the village; my body knows the way automatically, like a compass. Each step resounds with the crunch of fresh flakes underfoot.

I can imagine, you know. Of course the Republic of Belarus is not going anywhere any time soon, and I'll be right here alongside it, its mirror image of flesh and bone. But maintain an unlife long enough and you begin to understand some human concepts thanks to proximity. For example: the fear of dying.

No, the villagers were more right than I first gave them credit for.

Who am I to burst into these storm-blown winter birches, disturbing the pristine snowfall and demanding that one of my own citizens just screw off already? No, no, forget it. I'm nearly relieved to be meeting the villagers' expectations of my failure. Who am I to meddle? Haven't they, over the centuries, made me who I am? It's not my right to come over here and upend their psychocultural development only because I met a meat vendor in a train carriage and thought I would try to be nice.

But I will make up for it. I'll return to the village and, with forlorn apologies, buy a nice, large soup bone with a credit card. This place will misremember me. Some flighty, ineffective city girl with her head in the clouds. On the other hand, they'll remember that they tried, at least, and they'll keep their ghost—who might or might not be their grandmother, but who was unquestionably one of them.

I don't mind this compromise; personally, I don't feel the need to be remembered well. It's its history that gives a place its character, and what's history but the leftover and lingering dead?


End file.
